I guess Jess and I partied just a little too hard after the Dem’s big victories on Tuesday night, because I’m still feeling under the weather. What is the saying? “wine and liquor, never sicker”? “liquor and beer, in the clear”? “wine and coke, such a dope”? Whatever it is, I got it wrong.

Give us a few days to get up off the floor and return to finish off our battle of the environmental blogs. In the meantime, enjoy these fine posts from our hoary past: #1, and #2. Cheers!

I’m sure you’re all on tenterhooks waiting to see the outcome of our recently announced, completely unfair, arbitrary, and unasked-for battle of the environmental blogs. Who’s got the class to win this skating competition, and who’s standing in the shadows with a crowbar?

Just like those cardinals who confab to elevate a new pope, our progress so far has been a model of, um, restraint. A Google spreadsheet has been generated to record the arbitrary ratings which will separate the enviroblogical Nancy Kerrigans from the Tonya Hardings. All the blog names and URLs have been alphabetized nicely, which gives the project a pleasing air of officialdom.

Now that all is in order, we need to simply READ, and wait for the hand of God, I mean the tendrils of Gaia, to direct us.

In the meantime I’ve imperiously decided to eliminate a few sites from the running. …more

When you start a a new writing project it’s natural to spend a lot of time checking out the competition. Who has little to say, and who awes you with their wit and savvy?

And for myself, I spend time thinking about how this genre of writing can and should be different than journalism, magazine features, etc.

Here at bottleworld we’re trying, slowly but surely, to do something original and worthwhile, and onoccasion I think we succeed. At the same time we’ve initiated a major new project: a review of other environmental blogs out there. We’re not just going to list them, we’re actually going to read them and rate them according to some insidious system of our own devising, and find the champions, be they ever so humble, like the good old Kenora Thistles.

Yes, it’s a competition, with the prize being “props”! And maybe a bag of Stumptown coffee. I’m not sure yet what the prizes and criteria are going to be, but I’ve discovered this in my explorations so far: …more

Step back to the heady days of 1992, when Lester Brown of the indubitable Worldwatch Institute — who I love for piling on fact after fact about otherwise impenetrably large global issues — wrote an article for New Scientist titled “Ten years to save the world.”

It was an urgent message, and very much the zeitgeist of those heady early-mid-1990s. Luminaries from Helen Caldecott to Neil Young started slipping similar ten-year deadlines into their speeches and album covers. I was roused. I dove into work at a prominent ecological research center with a righteous fury: to discover something, who knows what, that could really help.

I was a kid on my first mission…

…then everything went black.

Now it’s 2006 and I feel like I’m waking up in a strange house on a strange couch. Where the hell am I? What have I been doing? Did I eat all these chips and drink all this Wild Turkey? Is this a god forsaken hickie? Did all my flailing around make any difference? And most important, did we save the world, or am I in some interstellar purgatory?